The report, which measures mobile market share for the U.S. during a three month period ending November 2011, provides an average among over 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers.

According to comScore, 234 million Americans age 13 and over used mobile devices in the three month period, and 91.4 million of them are smartphone owners. Android-based devices took the lead position with 46.9 percent share in the smartphone market. Apple took second place with 28.7 percent, followed by RIM (16.6 percent), Microsoft (5.2 percent) and Symbian (1.5 percent).

Samsung, which creates mobile Android-based devices, was the handset leader during the three month timeframe with 25.6 percent market share. This was a 0.3 increase from the previous three month period ending August 2011. LG followed with 20.5 percent, Motorola had 13.7 percent, Apple had 11.2 percent and RIM fell in last place with 6.5 percent.

The results hardly seem surprising, since a report from earlier this month stated that Android claims nearly half of the U.S. smartphone market. Also, Android dominated comScore's report ending August 2011 with 43.8 percent market share, leaving Apple in second place with 27.3 percent.

Another unsurprising factor about comScore's report is that RIM has lost market share since the three month period ending August 2011, sliding from 19.7 percent to 16.6 percent in top smartphone platforms and also falling from 7.1 percent to 6.5 percent top mobile OEMs. More than likely, its tumble is due to RIM's October data outage that lasted four days and spanned the U.S., Canada, Europe, South America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

quote: Your own prejudices against this "bad" (for Apple) piece of history do not change the fact that now things are very similar to those in 1990s. You just afraid to admit this because you are afraid of this particular "bad" piece of history.

Of course it's going to repeat, no one can dominate all areas of their product, thats what almost killed Apple in the 90's, just as that tight fisted control killed other products like Toshiba with HD-DVD or Sony with Betamax, I guess Apple stiil haven't grabbed a clue and changed their business practices...

quote: For the same reasons developers made less money with Windows than with Apple back in those early PC days. This did not prevent Windows from winning in the end though.

Exactly, you can't make more more in the end by marketing to the few, lets say the 20% of Apple people how many of those 20% are going to buy the app...with Android you have almost 3x the people to market the app too...probabaly 4-5x more people in the near future to which they would make far more by sheer volume (Business 101). If indeed they actualy make more money on iOS, then why are developers feverishly porting their once exclusive iOS apps to Android, and Android Market almost at the same number of available apps...Simple marketshare.

quote: then why are developers feverishly porting their once exclusive iOS apps to Android, and Android Market almost at the same number of available apps...Simple marketshare.

Nonsense, Android development has flatlined over the last year while iOS development continues to accelerate. Forget games and everyday apps, enterprise apps are flourishing on iOS simply because it gets deployed in businesses over Android because it is more secure. Microsoft has dozens of iOS apps since 2008. Skydrive and XBox Live apps just released in the last month, while there are about half a dozen MS on Android, and they're just front ends to Bing and MSN.

A lot of people here seem confused, they think that Android sales have been at the expense of iOS, while in iPhone sales have grown alongside it. Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile/Phone have been the casualties of the last year.

In any case, greater profitability combined with a unified hardware and OS base means that iOS development is a no-brainer for developers. Why develop for a fragmented platform where people spend less money, even if it has more users? The situation is even more dire when it comes to Honeycomb tablets, developers are staying even farther away.